Quotes from Jonathan Sacks

the greatest challenge comes when we are least conscious of the presence of a challenge.

This therefore was the merit of the patriarchs, that beside the fact that they were righteous and pious and loved God to the utmost extent, they were also upright. In their relations with gentiles – even the worst idolaters – they acted out of love, and sought their good, for this is what allows the world to endure. Thus we find that Abraham, though he hated their wickedness, prostrated himself in prayer for the people of Sodom, for he wanted them to survive.

The trouble was that they also argued that the worst thing you can have is certainty. Conviction, they said, leads to tyranny. On this they were wrong, indeed self-contradictory. Hayek was certain that freedom was preferable to slavery

It is when we are most blessed that we are most in need of protection – and the protection for which we pray is that the blessing remain a blessing and not turn into a curse – the curse of forgetting from where the blessings come.

A creed that tells us that we are no more than selfish genes, with nothing in principle to separate us from the animals, in a society whose strongest motivators are money and success, in a universe that came into existence for no reason whatsoever and for no reason will one day cease to be, will never speak as strongly to the human spirit as one that tells us we are in the image and likeness of God in a universe he created in love.

What the secularists forgot is that Homo sapiens is the meaning-seeking animal. If there is one thing the great institutions of the modern world do not do, it is to provide meaning.

This paradox suggests that Judaism has a different understanding of language than the one that prevails in the West and had its origins in ancient Greece. The philosophers, heirs to the Greeks, tended to think of language as conveying information. What matters is whether it is true or false.

Faith is the defeat of probability by the power of possibility.

God] gave us only over beast, fish, fowl, Dominion absolute; that right we hold By his donation; but man over men He made not lord; such title to himself Reserving, human left from human free.

A fellow scientist visited Bohr at his home and saw to his amazement that Bohr had fixed a horseshoe over the door for luck. 'Surely, Niels, you don't believe in that?' 'Of course not,' Bohr replied. 'But you see – the thing is that it works whether you believe in it or not.

Read any Comments section on the Web, and you will see what this means: the replacement of reason by anger, and argument by vilification. Civility is dying, and when it dies, civilisation itself is in danger.

Judaism is a religion of rejoicing; of remembering where we came from, and therefore not taking our blessings for granted; of recalling the source of the good, and therefore not forgetting the larger truth that it comes to us from the hand of God; of knowing that what we have, God has placed in our trust, to be used for the good of all, not just ourselves.

All social animals need to find ways of keeping the group together, managing disputes, appeasing frayed emotions, helping individuals within the group recover their poise after a bruising encounter. Primates do this by grooming, stroking one another. But this degree of intimacy is possible only in a relatively small group. Humans, by using language as a substitute for embrace, can manage more relationships and thus build larger groups.

God hates hatred between people, and Scripture reckons it as equal to idolatry, forbidden sex, and bloodshed combined.

speech was seen in Judaism not simply as a means of conveying information, though it is that as well, but also and essentially as a means of holding the group together without coercive force.

leadership as the building of the adaptive capacity of a people.

In an age in which rulers wrote history in the form of triumphal inscriptions, the Israelites alone recorded their failures more vividly than their successes.

There are failings to which intensely religious people are sometimes prone, namely, indifference to the injustices of society, a willingness to overlook corruption within their own ranks, and a tendency to believe that attachment to God relieves one of the duty to be upright, civil, and gracious in one's dealings with human beings.

Evil speech kills three people: the one who says it, the one who listens to it, and the one about whom it is said.

A free society is a moral achievement. That is the central insight of the Torah. It depends on the existence of a shared moral code, a code we are taught by our parents, a code we internalise in the course of growing up, a code for whose maintenance we are collectively responsible. Today, throughout much of the West, morality has been largely outsourced to governments and regulatory bodies. The

Two phenomena are often confused: righteousness and self-righteousness. Outwardly they appear similar but between them is all the difference in the world. The righteous see the good in people, the self-righteous see the bad. The righteous have a high opinion of others, the self-righteous a high opinion of themselves. The righteous leave us feeling enlarged, the self-righteous leave us feeling diminished. The righteous lift us up, the self-righteous put us down.

That is because speech is much more than the conveying of information. It is the substance of relationship, and when this is poisoned, trust and the social bond are undermined. We use the phrase "character assassination" precisely because some form of violence is being committed, even if it is verbal rather than physical.

History has no more unlikely heroes than the Israelites of Moses' day. Capricious, fractious, wayward, hardly able to see tomorrow, let alone the unfolding drama of the centuries, they became, in Herman Melville's evocative phrase, the bearers of "the ark of the liberties of the world.

Who am I? Why am I here? How then shall I live? These are questions to which the answer is prescriptive not descriptive, substantive not procedural. The result is that the twenty-first century has left us with a maximum of choice and a minimum of meaning.